Because business school also trains them to minimize costs and maximize quarterly profits. And their managers and stockholders reward them for that as well. Which inevitably leads to that behavior and a bunch of other idiotic ones. Because as you demonstrate with the bit about fixed costs, a lot of these numbers are fictions. Sometimes convenient fictions, but always fictions.

This is in contrast to the Lean approach where one minimizes waste and maximizes value delivered to the end user. In Lean thinking, staff aren't a cost to be shed ASAP, they're an asset, one you invest in.

That doesn't strike me as particularly paradoxical. Hate-crimes laws recognize existing substantial bias against particular minority groups with an eye toward reducing the bias. Most laws recoginize an existing problem and have the aim of reducing it.

I'm saying your question is nonsensical. The crime is "inciting racial hatred". It's a crime because there's a longstanding problem with racial hatred which people would like to stop.

Similarly, inciting a riot is a crime because that was a significant problem at some point. Imagine you find somebody convicted of inciting a riot and then ask me "well, what if he didn't incite?" or "what if it wasn't a riot he was inciting?" I'd have the same response to your question above: a) then it wouldn't be a crime, and b) you're missing the point.

It seems very weird. One rents something when one can't afford to buy it. Domain names cost very little, so they should just own the domain outright, especially as it's the one whose name matches the legal entity. As far as I'm concerned, any web site developer that doesn't insist that the client own the domain name in a case like this is at best negligent.

But it's also the kind of thing a shady operator would do to take advantage of naive clients.

Sure, but it makes it an understandable mistake on the part of Rackspace. And if the company gave Rackspace some documentation that the poster was buying the name on behalf of Learning Together, then the transfer may have been proper.

More importantly, though, it puts the poster in a different light. He concealed material facts in his summary, and on the face of it trying to hold on to a client's domain is shady. It makes me wonder what else he's hidden.

Whoa. That puts a different light on things. The poster, who does web development, bought a domain name learning-together.ca which was used by his client Learning Together Inc. Rackspace transferred control of the domain name from the poster to Learning Together, Inc. It seems very weird indeed that the poster is trying to keep control of that domain.

Yes, exactly. On a couple of occasions a sternly worded letter from a lawyer has worked wonders for me.

My favorite was when a company who owed me for months of contract work suddenly got a case of we-can't-afford-to-pay. My lawyer wrote a letter explaining that under California law, wages had to be paid before anything else, and encouraged them to contact the very energetic state agency in charge of enforcing that if they were unclear. It was a masterpiece of subtle menace, and I got a wire transfer for the whole amount two days later. Total cost to me: a few hundred bucks. A decade later, he's still my lawyer.